[Solved] CWBL won't launch, gets stuck on driver

[John Vere]

Heads up. A while back I was having Sonar crashes when opening projects. Windbg pointed at Sonar. Exe. 
Safe mode revealed it was a bunch of Pro Channel modules. 
Support always tells you to perform a clean install because they don’t have a solution. 
It never worked for me. And in the end I lost all my personal data from the last 5 years. 
 

So personally I’m not a big fan of the clean install. 

[OPunWide]

2 hours ago, John Vere said:

So personally I’m not a big fan of the clean install. 

I completely agree. It's just like "Reinstall Windows". It might work, but it will be really painful.
 

I guess I need to go find out what Windbg is. Yours is the 2nd mention.

Edited July 18 by OPunWide
add windbg comment

[OPunWide]

5 hours ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

Do you really mean S3 or Sonar X3?

Sonar 3 Producer Edition. I've typed it so many times I kept abbreviating it more and more, and I guess took it too far.

Thanks for your answers. They make me less worried about the damage that might get caused. But it also sounds like I need to get CWBL running.

Your note about not uninstalling CWBL after everything is working should be a BOLD sticky post. In browsing all these threads for a solution, the "should I uninstall" it question comes up a lot.

[John Vere]

The best practices for Cakewalk products has always been installing the oldest version first and go from oldest to the newest. 

My routine after I re installed Windows 11 is 8.5, X3 then running CCC to install the goodie’s and Splat. No point in installing CbB for me I just installed Free Sonar.
I might install Free Next but don’t see much point because it doesn’t have any instruments which is why I kinda like it. 
Audacity has the best stem separation tool out of all the free software I tried. 

[OPunWide]

@John Vere I know it's oldest first. The problem that started this mess was that I found some of my plugins were missing so I reinstalled Sonar 3 to get them.

Thanks for mentioning the Audacity stem tool! I didn't know it existed and got it this morning. I think I'm going to find it very useful.

You may have also pointed out a potential problem: I never had CCC installed, and didn't know it existed. Perhaps I had it on one of my old computers and forgot about it. It sounds like it is (was?) optional. I've been installing things by CD, and then the minimal set after one computer refused to install Old Sonar 1.

[OPunWide]

It's finally working!

This was the solution from support after more than one week of back and forth and talking them out of a full uninstall of CWBL. There were no other changes made that aren't covered earlier in this thread.

Hopefully this will help someone else during the few days of life that CWBL has remaining.

=================
Support:

Right now, it seems like the WDM driver profiling is the main thing tripping us up. There’s a way we can try to reset that without needing to boot into a project or mess with clean installs. Here's what I'd suggest next:
 
Open the Windows Registry Editor
Navigate to this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Cakewalk Music Software\Cakewalk\Core

Find the entry called OnboardingShown and set its value to 0
Launch Cakewalk by BandLab
 
This should force the onboarding wizard to appear the next time you run CbB. When it asks you to choose a driver mode, try selecting WASAPI Shared instead of ASIO or WDM to see if it allows the app to open cleanly.
 
If that still doesn’t work, there’s one more trick you can try:
Temporarily disable all sound devices in Device Manager, then launch CbB in Safe Mode. This can sometimes bypass driver-related hangs.

=================
Me:

The OnboardingShown change had no effect. The popup was still there. I left the setting at 0 and tried the other suggestion.

After disabling all the drivers I did a Safe Mode start and CWBL opened. I knew I was going to need the ASIO drivers for the AudioBox, so I selected that instead of the suggested WASAPI.

To be safe I rebooted, then reenabled the AudioBox, then started CWBL and it worked. After that I re-enable the rest of the audio drivers because I knew I would need them too. (To be clear: the ASIO4ALL had been completely removed and stayed removed.)